NFL mock draft: Expert predictions for the 2015 NFL Draft - Business Insider

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I like the Wisdom of the Crowd methodology that Business Insider used and this is the guy, along with OT Andrus Peat from Stanford, whose name has been linked to the Giants the most.

from Business Insider:
NFL mock draft: Expert predictions for the 2015 NFL Draft - Business Insider:

9. New York Giants — Brandon Scherff, OG

Experts: 5 out of 15

School: Iowa 

Other possibilities*: Andrus Peat (OT, Stanford), Danny Shelton (DT, Washington) 

Key expert quote: Rang: "The Giants could be intrigued by some of the edge rushers still on the board, but if Scherff - the draft's best offensive lineman - is available, he would make too much sense to pass up."

'via Blog this'

Considering that the Giants have the #9 pick and presumably do not want it again anytime soon, you would think they would go for one of the skill players for max impact. I liked Florida's LB Dante Fowler, Jr. for them as a sleeper pick. He's 6-2, 261 and Florida fast, but the consensus here has him going before the G-men pick.

Among the linemen, you can't go wrong with Miami OT Ereck Flowers at 6-5, 324, right in there with Scherff and Peat. Scherff is the only one that seems suited to move to OG, and he would be a big one, so that may be why he is rising up the board.

If they go for safety help, Alabama's Landon Collins might be the only DB worth picking in the #9 slot. But he looks like he's slipping more to the bottom half of the first-round rather than the front half.

They need to cash in big at both the #9 slot and #41 in the second round. Maybe they roll the dice and hope that one of the highly regarded OL men fall to the second round. Overall, I think #9 is too high to draft an offensive lineman, but Eli is a valuable property. You have to keep him upright.

I thought earlier the Giants might be looking at the DE's in case JPP leaves the building, but Shane Ray 6-3, 245 from Missouri and Randy Gregory 6-6, 245 from Nebraska have the dreaded "off-field issues" attached to them.

And here I thought that you had to be badder than Charles Manson to not get drafted.

"If Charles Manson ran a 4.3, you'd better believe we'd sign him." - Jimmie Johnson

Being a dumb-ass at best and a borderline junior-sociopath at worst has not appeared to diminish the draft prospects of one Jameis Winston. Not one little bit.

It's interesting that after all the PR hullabaloo over domestic violence, involvement in murders and (alleged) rapes, that Roger Goodell may be forced to publicly welcome to the league with the 1st overall pick, a young man still dealing with the legal implications of a rape charge. Maybe he'll have a better secondary excuse than the one offered for the "stolen" (allegedly) crab-legs.

It's a real simple concept fellas.

• That which you reward or incentivize, you get more of.
• That which you penalize, you get less of. 

So much for changing the culture. Or maybe he did make fundamental change with this move:

from bloomberg.com
http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-04-28/nfl-will-end-its-tax-exempt-status-goodell-tells-team-owners

Goodell and the NFL have now basically told Congress and all the political special interest groups that have dogged the NFL for the past couple of years, "La-la-la, I can't hear you anymore." Or something along those lines.

  

Now they can go back to doing what they do best. Being the National Football League. Oops.

It will be worth watching if only to see how well Mel Kiper's hair has aged or whether Todd McShay can induce a brain embolism in old Mel via poor prospect analysis. That would be compelling live TV.

The Buccaneers are officially on the clock.   

Hats off to Hollywood and Wealth Inequality and Armored car rides to safety when the revolution comes!!!

Didn't win the Oscar? It's OK, here's your $168,000 Oscars swag bag.

				Didn't win the Oscar? It's OK, here's your $168,000 Osca... The non-winners in the top six categories won't take home a golden statue, but the consolation prize is a swag bag valued at $168,000 that includes an astrology rea...
				View on www.washingtonpost...	Preview by Yahoo

I haven't changed my opinion that the voting on the Oscars exist to make the BBWAA Hall of Fame voting look legitimate.

Hollywood speaking out against wage/wealth inequality is almost as bad as Al Sharpton talking about how "Bush lied". You might want to get a different messenger. 

At least in good company with the women who champion Fifty Shades of Grey and then rant about domestic violence and date rape. Talk about actively participating in your own demise. There are probably worse examples in the course of human history, but this one could be in the team picture. 

Neal Patrick Harris gets early candidate for quote of the year with his joke about these tool-bags (and many others ) needing an "armored car ride to safety when the revolution comes". 

You're preaching to the choir there, Champ.  

from PJ Media:

http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2015/02/23/hollywoods-rich-famous-trumpet-wage-inequality/

The speech stood in stark contrast to host Neil Patrick Harris's earlier joke about the $160,000 SWAG bags being given to those nominated in the Oscars' top 5 categories. After saying that the bags were loaded with such goodies as two vacations and a $20,000 astrology reading, Harris joked that the bags also contained "an armored car ride to safety when the revolution comes." The stars clad in gold and diamonds responded with appropriate Marie Antoinette-style laughs and gloved claps.

I'm sorry to say I felt compelled to dig deeper when I saw the description of the "goodie bag" included "luxury condoms". I thought what, pray tell, elevates a mere condom to luxury status?

 Oscar swag bags: $167,000 — and racy

				Oscar swag bags: $167,000 — and racy You can't help but wonder if Oscar nominees Meryl Streep or Robert Duvall or Reese Witherspoon really need -- or even want -- one of these. Want them or not, the Os...
				View on www.wgrz.com	Preview by Yahoo

I was left disappointed and deflated. But that's Hollywood for you, Hats off to them!!! 

~;::::::;( )">  ¯\_( )_/¯

Survey finds sharp increase in teen use of HGH - News-Record.com: News

I thought all we needed was drug testing in baseball and this trend was going to reverse? SOB, they pulled another fast one on us.

I guess the youths of America were not following the example of A-Rod, Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire -- if indeed any of them even know who these guys are or hold them up as role models anyway.

from News-Record.com:

Survey finds sharp increase in teen use of HGH

				Survey finds sharp increase in teen use of HGH NEW YORK — Experimentation with human growth hormones by America's teens more than doubled in the past year, as more young people looked to drug...
				View on www.news-record.com	Preview by Yahoo

"There's so much pressure on winning — it's tough for these kids to stay true to themselves," he said. "I can't change every kid's mind, but if I can do my part and other people do their part, we can beat this monster."

Tygart, who as USADA's chief oversaw investigations of Armstrong and Hamilton, noted that stringent testing regimens are an increasingly effective deterrent to doping among athletes in major pro sports and in INTERNATIONAL competitions.

"But most young athletes are not in any testing PROGRAM, and their chance of getting caught is zero," he said. "When left unchecked, the win-at-all-cost culture will take over and athletes will make the wrong decision."

Among the groups seeking to reverse the teen doping trend is the Texas-based Taylor Hooton Foundation, named after a 17-year-old high school athlete whose suicide in 2003 was blamed by his family on his use of anabolic steroids. Its staff has spoken to thousands of young people at school assemblies and sports camps.

Donald Hooton Sr., Taylor's father and the foundation's president, depicted teen doping as an epidemic fueled by widespread ignorance among parents and coaches. He estimated that more than 1.5 million youths in the U.S. have tried steroids.

Information about teen use of performance-enhancing drugs is readily available online. The Mayo Clinic, for example, provides a list of possible hazards and side-effects, including stunted growth, ACNE, liver problems, shrunken testicles for boys and excess facial hair for girls.

The clinic urges parents to check the ingredients of over-the-counter products used by their teens, and to be on the lookout for warning signs, including increased aggressiveness, rapid weight gain, and needle marks in the buttocks or thighs.

'via Blog this'

But at least we have testing in baseball going for us.

And an endless stream of 1-0, 2-1 games to replace the 5-4, 6-5 games and they still take 3-3 1/2 hours to play. Where's the benefit? Well the cash register is still ringing and franchise values are more pumped up than Barry, Sammy, Alex and Markie-Mark could ever hope to be.

Kids are using these substances for the same reason(s) it seems they always have -- not to improve their performance on a baseball field -- but to improve the chances of securing more glances from and getting in more pantses of the opposite sex. Some things never change.  I blame the Hollywood culture. These numbers will go down when they attack IT with the same vigor and energy they attacked baseball.

Are We Creating a Culture of Moral Misfits?

Trying to make sense out of the senseless atrocity in Newtown, CT seems so futile at times. But this is the operative question that seems to come out of all events like this one or some derivative thereof:
"Are we creating a culture or moral misfits?"



from godfatherpolitics.com
Are We Creating a Culture of Moral Misfits?:

Our nation has a deep moral problem brought on by a belligerent secular worldview. And it’s not just religious people who have seen its impact. Yale Law Professor Arthur Allen Leff (1935–1981) put it this way:

“We are never going to get anywhere (assuming for the moment that there is somewhere to get) in ethical or legal theory unless we finally face the fact that, in the Psalmist’s words, there is no one like unto the Lord. . . . The so-called death of God turns out not to have been His funeral; it also seems to have affected the total elimination of any coherent, or even more-than-momentarily convincing, ethical or legal system dependent upon final authoritative, extrasystemic premises.”

 Put more simply, with God out of the picture, “everything is up for grabs.”[1]

'via Blog this'



This is the best response I could find and it flows out of the lessons we did not learn from Columbine and the testimony of the father of Rachel Scott, one of the students killed at Columbine.

Darrel Scott's speech to Congress:
http://www.americaspartynews.com/talk/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=3621

On that day, many students and teachers and administrators found themselves in gross violation of the Law of the Land handed down by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1962 -- one of many atrocities committed by this body -- and that is to remove prayer from the public schools.

I guarantee you on that day in 1999 at Columbine there were many who violated the law and asked for God's help openly and vainly. And I guarantee there were many in Newtown, CT who prayed in vain for help to a God they do not know very well and would not recognize if they met Him. They may as well have been praying to Santa or the Easter Bunny.

We have done of great job of bringing about The Naked Public Square (1984) that then-Lutheran pastor Richard John Niehaus warned us about (Niehaus subsequently became a Catholic priest in 1991).

(as an aside Niehaus was also on the correct side of the abortion (right to life) issue as well, standing in direct contrast to Chicago Cardinal (Chicago Values Suck) Bernadin when he compared the pro-life struggle to the civil rights movement of the 60's.)

It was a mistake to isolate abortion "from other issues of the sacredness of life" and to allow politicians to hide behind the skirt of the "seamless garment" argument provided to Catholic politicians by Bernadin. 

According to writer Joseph Sobran, "the seamless garment has turned out to be nothing but a loophole for hypocritical Catholic politicians. If anything", he adds, "it has actually made it easier for them than for non-Catholics to give their effective support to legalized abortion—that is, it has allowed them to be inconsistent and unprincipled about the very issues that Cardinal Bernardin said demand consistency and principle".^[11][12]

Regarding the Church's position on the death penalty, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) wrote in 2004 that Catholics could have a legitimate diversity of opinions on the matter, but not on abortion or euthanasia.^[13]) 

from wikipedia.org:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Allen_Leff

Arthur Allen Leff (1935–1981) was a professor of law at Yale Law School who is best known for a series of articles examining whether there is such a thing as a normative law or morality. Leff answers this question in the negative and follows the consequences to their logical conclusions.

In these works Leff attempts to directly address whether a normative morality can exist without God. [2] Leff answers the question in the negative. Leff states that absent an ultimate authority figure (i.e. God) handing down moral laws from on-high there is no reason for any person to prefer one set of behavior identified as "moral" to another. Leff terms this "the Grand Sez Who." In particular, it is impossible to resolve the conflict between the rights of the individual and the power of the collective, even though much of the time we can pretend that, for instance, the Constitution tells us where to draw the line. There are bound to be cases where we are left on our own, with no authoritative referee; there is no "brooding omnipresence in the sky", in the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., whom Leff quotes approvingly.

 Leff was an agnostic but his writings have been influential on Christian discussions of morality in the modern Era. Phillip E. Johnson has suggested that Leff's work is really a critique of the God is dead argument. [3] Johnson argues that the presence of evil in the world is evidence that there is an absolute morality which requires an absolute authority. Other Christian scholars have also applied Leff's critique to secular arguments for a normative morality. [4]

Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law, 1979 Duke L.J. 1229 (1979)
http://inklingz.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/unspeakable-ethics-unnatural-law-duke-law-journal3.pdf

Leff states as follows in the closing of UE, UL:

All I can say is this: it looks as if we are all we have. Given what we know about ourselves, and each other, this is an extraordinarily unappetizing prospect; looking around the world, it appears that if all men are brothers, the ruling model is Cain and Abel. Neither reason, nor love, nor even terror, seems to have worked to make us “good,” and worse than that, there is no reason why any thing should. Only if ethics were something unspeakable by us could law be unnatural, and therefore unchallengeable. As things stand now, everything is up for grabs. Nevertheless:

Napalming babies is bad.

Starving the poor is wicked.

Buying and selling each other is depraved.

Those who stood up and died resisting Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Idi Amin, and Pol Pot —and General Custer too— have earned salvation.

Those who acquiesced deserve to be damned.

There is in the world such a thing as evil.

[All together now:] Sez who?

God help us.

.

Basically, there seems to be two types of responses around the water cooler to events like this. There are those who respond "I don't understand how this type of thing could happen..." and those who respond "I not only understand why it happens, I'm only glad it doesn't happen more...". On one side are the secular progressives who worship at the shrine of moral relativism. On the other side are the evangelical conservatives and the religious understand moral absolutism even if they don't practice it to perfection in their own lives.

When we live in a country whose laws (morality) do not respect life much at the beginning or late stages, why do we even question why nobody has much respect for the lives (the ultimate human right -- life) of others during the middle or so-called productive stages?

I won't even discuss some of the immoral institutions (most reside in or are glorified by HOLLYWOOD) that totally disrespect the lives and dignity of human beings in the middle stages of life. So we do pretty much of a good job of shitting on the lives and dignity of life throughout all of its stages.

And then we wonder why incidents like Newtown and Columbine are prevalent in our society, in our culture? And we consistently point fingers in all the wrong directions. We are very well practiced at doing the wrong thing and instead of admitting our mistake and changing course -- we just continue down the same lost course, only faster and harder. The Lost Pilot Effect. (“Lost pilot” effect: If the correct strategy is not known or applicable, people will just do “more” of the wrong thing.)

for a more secular explanation of why we are where we are (LOST):
http://teaching.p-design.ch/mdm07/presentations/managerial_decision_making07_13_Retrospection.pdf

C'mon man. We can do better than this. We're smarter than this.

Unfortunately, for now my response to the question "Are we creating a culture of moral misfits?" is an unqualified "Yes!!"

We have become Amoral Nation. That slippery slope is a real SOB!